Star Trek: Phoenix

One of my favorite activities I've gotten into the past few years is playing tabletop RPGs. I'm almost always the game master, which suits me pretty well as I've always liked telling stories, real or imagined. While a post on my D&D campaign will be coming when I wrap it up (which should be in the next few weeks), I want to talk about my other campaign, this one using Modiphius' Star Trek Adventures system.

Set a few years after the Dominion War, I wanted a campaign to try and explore the idea of how Starfleet and the Federation would recover from such a grueling, bitter conflict. The most memorable parts of the Dominion War arc involved the lengths that our ostensible heroes would go to in order to win. On several occasions, they violated the very strictures that previous Star Trek shows had held up as inviolable. The writers of Deep Space 9 were also unflinching in how it portrayed the costs of such a war, physical & psychological alike. While the DS9 finale was the end of the war, I thought it would be fun to tell a story about the rebuilding that comes afterwards. A small science vessel venturing into unexplored space, the USS Phoenix seems an ideal place to tell that story.

It's a slightly different Starfleet we see now. After the Breen attack on Earth, the admiralty decided to decentralize their command structure, and most notably the academy system. While Starfleet Academy in San Francisco is one of those Star Trek touchstones, I always thought it couldn't possibly supply enough officers to staff a fleet of thousands of starships. So in my imagining here, the academy system has set up annexes & officer training programs in universities across the Federation. Correspondingly, the fleet looks a lot less human now. I have to say that point wasn't one I strictly intended to make, but when my players all chose to play non-human characters, I was really happy to lean into that idea. Many of the senior staff served in the war and were marked by it in some way. Nursing old injuries & traumas, they're having to learn how to be explorers again.

I'm still working on an overall arc for the campaign, but am having fun doing one-off adventures with that typical Star Trek episode format. Some of my most Trek-tastic friends live on the east coast, so to get them involved we've been playing using Roll20, which is a very robust toolset for running RPGs remotely. I'm still getting the hang of the rules, which are sufficiently different from D&D that I'm still figuring out how to improvise with them, but I expect that'll just take time & practice. Anyhoo, it's a lot of fun! But one of the most fun parts was putting together the intro sequence for it.

All Star Trek shows have an intro, so it's only fitting that this campaign should as well. My friend Sam Chin, who's also playing the Klingon first officer, lent his substantial vocal talents to it, and Youtube user Alvision100 was kind enough to let me use some of his material for this as well, he did the bits with the ship. The music came from a Star Trek themed roller coaster in Germany called Star Trek: Operation Enterprise, which is on my list of things to check out in Germany. I have to admit I did a bad thing and did not keep track of the attribution for the rest of the clips I used in this video, I tried to only pick clips that were explicitly put up for public use though. In any case, here's the intro!